What was the Democrat's strategy in Ohio, exactly?

As discussed by Toaster Talks in his excellent post about narrow casting in Ohio, the use of outsiders by ACT was an ill-advised strategy. Dean had tried similar tactics in Iowa and New Hampshire with equally disastrous results.

And after reading the 'Fighting for every last vote' article about Ohio, I was equally unconvinced by the Democrat's strategy, and their use of PDAs to assist them. However, the part of the CNN article that frustrated me most was the comment about tracking contact data:

But others are worried whether outside operators who are being sent into urban neighborhoods will really connect with and galvanize a notoriously recalcitrant group of voters. Or even keep track of them: at several houses where Lindquist stopped that afternoon, the registered voter had moved without leaving a phone number or forwarding address.

What is the point of showing people videos on your PDA, if you are not going to use the PDAs for what they are actually designed for - remote capture of data and synchronizing it back to a central database?! To be fair, maybe they did do that..I know the Republicans did. But if ACT and others were, it was not mentioned, not just in this article, but in the many I have read about PDAs as part of my research.

Every aspect of the campaigns we have discussed so far comes down to one thing - reliable and accurate data. Whether it is the email list, fundraising list, direct mail list or the volunteer list - doing all of that requires the campaign to know where their supporters are and whether they intend to vote for you, donate to you or help you in some way.

There was a sense throughout the article that ACT and others misunderstood the point of new technology. It is a tool, to improve the way you do the basic jobs of voter contact, issue identification and GOTV. Yet instead, they failed to utilize the core strengths of the technology, hoping that voters would be impressed by videos on a PDA.

I think the voters would have been more impressed had a local volunteer come to their door, known who they were, captured their concerns and issues on a PDA and made sure that they received prompt and relevant follow up from the campaign. Oh, in fact, I know they would have been more impressed - that's what the GOP did, and that's why they voted for George W Bush.

Expanding the capabilities of RSS

It seems RSS is beginning to build some momentum. MarketingVox cited this article on CNET this morning discussing Microsoft's plans to expand the capabilities of RSS. The main fact in the article is that Microsoft wants RSS to be able to list content in other ways than just creation date:

Microsoft is proposing a way to add ordering information so that an RSS feed could better handle things like an e-commerce site's list of best-selling items or calendar information ordered by the date of an event rather than when the appointment was created.

This seems like it would be great for campaign websites - if you could subscribe to a site, and have it list information by topic which is then updated regularly, or could have the campaign itinerary listed in date order, this could make RSS far superior to email as a publication mechanism.

However, as some people have pointed out in class, RSS is still a fairly niche technology. But the article also states that the next version of IE will 'fully support' RSS, with an entire team dedicated to ensuring it is delivered. Microsoft have a habit of taking a while to get these things right, but when they do they deliver, it tends to move that functionality into every day use.

The RSS support in Firefox is already excellent, especially with add-ons like Sage (see earlier posts). However, since IE has 90% of the market, it will need Microsoft to be fully supporting RSS before it can really become mainstream I suspect. Once it does, I can see a major push to get people using RSS feeds over email updates for campaigns.